My grandfather, mother, Trevor and grandmother, circa 1951.
My mother is sitting in what she and my father call The Garden Room. It’s a large extension to their modern house. The room is high ceilinged with exposed beams, and full of plants. It has a Scandinavian wood-burning stove in its centre. Its sleek chrome chimney reaches up through the roof. An assortment of wicker chairs sit around the wood burner. The garden beyond the room’s many windows is square and sheltered by fruit trees. It was once the walled garden of a great house here before a cul-de-sac of houses was built in 1979.
This is the house I lived in from the age of eleven until I went to university at eighteen. I’m back visiting my parents in October for four nights, alone. I’ve driven to York from south London where I now live with my husband and three sons. It’s taken me six hours. I’m here because I’m worried about my parents, who are both 80. Coronavirus is in full swing and they haven’t seen a family member since July. I’m risking giving them the disease even now. I don’t know if I might have it and be asymptomatic. I had considered staying in an Airbnb, even camping in their garden, but my mother vetoed all such precautions. Instead, I'm sitting a long way away from her, near the double doors that open onto the garden. Although they are not open at the moment because it’s too cold.
My mother and I are chatting. We’ve been chatting a lot, non-stop since I arrived last night. Without warning, she changes the subject. ‘It was the anniversary of Trevor’s death two days ago,’ she says. ‘Fifty-nine years.’ She doesn’t often mention her brother – Trevor – or what happened to him. Yet somehow I know the story word for word. ‘He should never have died,’ my mother says. ‘No,’ I agree. My mother tells the story again.
It was the night before Trevor’s fourteenth birthday and he was having an asthma attack. His mother, my grandmother, someone I knew only as ‘Nanny’ when she was alive, was nursing him alone in his bedroom upstairs in their large, detached house in Sutton Coldfield where my mother grew up. My mother was out of the evening. She was twenty-one years-old, seven years older than Trevor. She was out on a date with my father, long before he was my father. Trevor’s father – my grandad, Bill – was also out for the evening. Many years later we learnt who Bill was with that night, but that, as they say, is another story.
It is not unusual for Trevor to be having an asthma attack but this is an unusually severe one
My mother returns from her evening out with my father to find that the doctor has visited and given Trevor an injection – adrenalin, to help his heart. But he’s still struggling to breathe. Or perhaps by this time he’s limp and unresponsive. My mother isn’t sure on this point. She knows she went downstairs and rang the doctor again but was told by his wife that he was out. It was a Friday night and long before doctors had mobile phones or even pagers.
The doctor’s wife tells my mother to ring for an ambulance. My mother recalls the ambulance men arriving and carrying Trevor downstairs. I have a vivid image of this because I’ve been told this detail before and I remember the staircase of that house so well. It was huge, and it wound around a corner and down again with a landing in between. There were two enormous stained-glass windows on that landing and two large urns, or vases, on the ledges of those windows. If you ran past them quickly – as I often did because I was frightened there and wanted to get downstairs in a hurry – the floor slightly shook, then so did those two vases.
I see him now, Trevor, a young boy, thin and pale, from the few photographs I have seen of him, fragile, you might say, being carried pathetically past those windows and those vases on that landing. I see my mother at the bottom of the stairs looking up and waiting. Although, of course, she may have been at the top of the stairs. But that is where I see her as she recounts this story again, at the bottom, standing on the vast parquet floor that covers the cavernous hallway. I see my grandmother – Nanny – still upstairs. But she might have been downstairs, too. Although I doubt it. She would have been upstairs still, with Trevor. She would have been overseeing his lifting out of bed. Of this, I’m suddenly sure. But I can’t know, of course. I can’t know any of it.
My grandmother, coming down behind the ambulance men, sees Trevor has wet himself. ‘Oh, he’s wet himself,’ she says. Something like that. I hear it now. I hear her soft Birmingham accent. She’s embarrassed, slightly.
As my mother tells it today, sitting in the garden room in October 2020, she says she realizes Trevor may have already been dead. This is something she’s considered in retrospect. Something she’s dwelt on. One of those tragic details that lends weight to the story, adds to its pathos. When people die the fluid inside them escapes. At twenty-one, my mother wouldn’t have known this. It’s likely my grandmother wouldn’t have known it either.
I sit in a wicker chair with my legs drawn up, listening to this detail again. ‘He was wet,’ my mother says. ‘I think perhaps he was already dead.’ I nod. It feels cathartic, this retelling. It feels as if my mother has a great need to expel it again, even after all these years.
Of course, I think. Of course, it has always been there, always in the back of her mind. Now one of my children is twenty-one I realise how young she was. What a trauma it must have been. How even though when I was growing up she hardly mentioned Trevor, he must have been always in her mind.
The ambulance men take Trevor to hospital. My grandmother goes with him in the ambulance. My grandfather, who has returned home by now, follows in his car. My mother telephones for my father.
At this point, my father comes into the garden room so he's able to corroborate this. ‘It was late,’ my mother says to my father. ‘I must have woken your parents’. And my father, standing by his study door which opens on to the garden room at one end, leans against it and agrees this must have happened but he also can’t remember for sure. ‘How did you get to my house?’ My mother asks him. ‘I think father must have driven me.’ He means his own father. ‘I usually cycled,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t that night.’ ‘No,’ my mother says. So they agree on this. My father waited with my mother at the house until her parents returned. They didn’t need telling that Trevor had died. They agree about this too. My grandmother went into one room, an enormous room that was called the lounge, that no one ever went in, and my grandfather went into the kitchen. My mother went to sit with my grandmother. My father went to sit with my grandfather. My father now says he can’t remember anything that was said that night, he just remembers the atmosphere in the house. I’m left imagining what that was like.
‘They didn’t comfort each other,’ my mother says of her parents. ‘They each grieved alone.’
In the morning my mother rose early and went downstairs and collected Trevor’s birthday cards from the doormat and hid them. My grandfather went off in his car to collect Aunty Nell. There’s a long explanation from my mother about who Aunty Nell was and why she was important to my grandfather, why she visited them every weekend when my mother was a child. I know this already and I can sum it up easily: Aunty Nell was my grandfather’s aunt, the sister of his mother who died when he was fourteen, on his birthday (who incidentally was called Elizabeth, which is my name).
My mother is sitting at the kitchen table when Aunty Nell arrives. Her mother, Nanny, is at the cooker. Aunty Nell enters the kitchen and walks across it (it too was a large room) and rests her head in her arms on the sink and sobs uncontrollably.
My mother is furious about this. She’s furious on every retelling. Now she explains that Aunty Nell must have kept her feelings under control in the car with my grandfather, then let them loose in the kitchen with my grandmother. This, of course, upset my grandmother and, in my mother’s words, ‘set her off again’. This is what made my mother furious and still makes her furious.
The last detail in this story, the place where it usually ends, is that not long afterwards Aunty Nell told my mother that she – my mother – never cared about Trevor. Now I think this must have been because my mother showed little emotion when he died, which is strange because she’s a very emotional person. She cries at the drop of a hat. She cries at TV adverts when families have to leave each other at airports. She doesn’t seem to have cried about Trevor, though. Certainly, she’s never mentioned crying about him and I’ve never seen her cry about him. Perhaps it’s too painful to cry about. But still, here she is, at 80-years-old, telling me this story again.
‘That’s so sad,’ I tell her. ‘It’s such a terribly sad story.’
‘He should never have died,’ my mother says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t have died in this day and age.’
‘His heart gave out,’ says my mother. ‘He had a heart attack.’
‘Perhaps,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t the asthma? Perhaps it was the adrenalin?’
My mother agrees. She nods. ‘It might have been too much for his heart.’
We sit in silence for a moment, thinking about the doctor who called at my grandparents’ house in 1961 and gave Trevor an injection then went out for the evening, who didn’t have a mobile phone or a pager.
‘Shall we make lunch?’ my mother says. And we get up and go into the kitchen with my father.
22.10.20
@WriteMcFarlane
